Seasoned Protesters

By Alan Caruba

Have you taken a close look at the protesters showing up at the town hall meetings being held by the horrified members of Congress? These folks are often quite OLD.

Unlike the union or ACORN thugs that Democrats use to intimidate attendees, some of those giving their Congressman an ear-full show up in wheelchairs or using walkers. The healthier among them seem quite at ease raising their voices and why is that?

Being among that generation, it occurred to me that they are the same people who showed up for the Civil Rights marches and at the Vietnam War protests in Washington, D.C when I was a young man. I was there, too. I saw these folks show up to demand President Nixon resign after the Watergate scandal got too big for him to silence.

Many of them--often quite liberal--continued showing up for environmental causes or for a march to find a cure for breast cancer. These are seasoned protesters; often liberal in their youth and just as often now conservative in their older years.

This generation of elder protesters has had plenty of practice and now has plenty to protest about. They aren’t a bunch of kids with no knowledge of history. These people lived history!

To begin with, they don’t want the government messing around with their medical insurance plans and they don’t want the government telling their doctors what they can and cannot do to ensure they get the best medical care available.

Those liberal programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus the prescription add-ons, may be socialism, but they like that kind of socialism; it’s the kind that helps pay their bills. Beyond that, they want the government to butt out.

Crazy schemes to sell carbon credits in order to limit carbon dioxide seem like the most absurd notions to the elderly, many of whom moved to warmer climates in Florida and Arizona to get away from the cold winters of the northern states. Global warming? They’re for it!

Like the rest of the population, they know that the weather has turned cooler all around the nation and those that keep up with such matters know there is no “global warming” and that they’re being scammed in order to put a huge new tax on the use of all energy.

One of the great appeals of Barack Obama when he was campaigning was his youth. Poor John McCain looked and sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge beside him. Youth, however, has some inherent problems such as the lack of the kind of experience needed to run a superpower, to find the right answers to end a deep recession, and to deal with the real threats to security and peace in the world.

At this point, the old folks know that the unemployment rate is much higher than the “official” announcement by the government. They know that Obama is doing nothing to thwart Iran from getting nuclear weapons. They know he hates Israel and they are seriously beginning to think he hates America, too.

All those old folks showing up at the town hall meetings were seriously offended when President Obama ran around the world apologizing for America’s having saved a large portion of it from the Empire of Japan and the Nazis in World War II, for having faced down the former Soviet Union for most of their lives, and for having had to invade Iraq (twice!) to stop Saddam from making war on his neighbors.

Some recall Pearl Harbor and all of them recall 9/11 like it was yesterday.

Listening to the new Dear Leader Barack telling some members of Congress to shut up and get out of the way because he wants to turn the U.S. into a giant Communist commune does not go down well with those old folks.

Their bones may ache a bit and their gait may be slower than in former days, but they know how to protest so they went to the town hall meetings to let their Congress critter know they don’t like being ignored, bullied, or taxed into the grave and beyond.

On September 12, there’s going to be a mass march in Washington, D.C. to protest proposed taxes and, even though I am in my 70s, I might just show up.